Near Field Communication, or NFC, has been mentioned a few times here on Android.Appstorm, including a few articles by yours truly. The topic really fascinates and excites me because of the endless possibilities it affords us. About a year ago I wrote an article entitled Near Field Communication and the Future of Mobile, where I outlined what’s in store for NFC-enabled cell phones, of which Android has a few.

However, NFC isn’t only for phones. There are devices called NFC tags, and they can really shake up the way we do things.

The smartphone industry is a fickle world and many users choose to swap out phones to stay up to date with the latest hardware. I, for one, never buy phones tied to any sort of contract so i’m able to easily sell or pass on old hardware to make room for the latest and greatest.

With a large market for second-hand phones and a plethora of businesses who will take your phone off your hands if you can’t find a independent buyer, it’s a practice you can easily get involved in. In this How To article, we’re going to take a look at preparing your phone for sale (both hardware-wise and software-wise).

Most photos taken with phone cameras are grainy, blurry, washed out, dark or just plain boring. It’s sad, because they don’t have to be. People usually blame the quality of their cameras for the quality of their shots, but that’s actually not very important when it comes to getting a good picture.

So how does one get good pictures out of a phone camera? It’s really not about the megapixels. Let’s forget about the technical specifications of our cameras for a few minutes and check out some simple things we can do to improve our photography, keeping in mind certain scenarios we regularly come across in our daily lives. The real lesson here to be learned here is to adapt. Think about how your shots could be imporved before shooting them and you’ll be taking great pictures in no time.

Like the idea of the ASUS Transformer, but don’t want to splash out on a new netbook? Well, I recently stumbled across an article written by Web.AppStorm editor Matthew Guay on How-To-Geek, describing how to run Android on a Netbook. I was intrigued and tried it out as an experiment. Since it runs off a flash drive, nothing is installed or written to the hard drive. Read on to learn about how you can run Android on your netbook, and how it fares.(more…)

After reading this article, you’ll be able to use your Android phone as a webcam for Skype, Google Talk, Facebook, or any other program on your computer that can use a webcam. I was frustrated that Skype didn’t allow video chat for my phone when they recently updated their app to allow this, and decided to figure out a way to do this using the existing video camera on my phone. Why buy a separate webcam if you can use the one in your pocket?

Note: only some Android phones work using this method, and some newer phones have a dedicated webcam built in.

There’s many a reason for you to want to take a screen capture on Android. Maybe you’re a developer wanting to take publicity screenshots of your app? Or maybe you’re wanting to become a writer for a site like this but have no idea how to source images for your post? Well, let me explain.

Unfortunately, screenshot taking is not as easy as on alternative platforms. It involves the Android SDK and USB debugging. So find that cable and get started! (more…)

Update (27 May 2015): Since this article was originally written, it’s become much easier to free up space on your Android device. These days it’s possible to take advantage of services such as Google Drive or Dropbox to relieve the strain on your SD card. If you want a more advanced cloud storage solution, check out Hightail, which allows you to access and share important files on your Android devices or anywhere else.

“Low on space: Phone storage space is getting low.” Uh-oh. This issue is easy to fix if you’ve rooted your phone, but what if you haven’t? Let’s take a look at the possibilities…

What’s the Big Deal?

Does it really matter if you run out of internal phone storage? After all, you’ve got an SD card that can fit gigabytes of data and applications.

Actually, yes; being low on internal storage causes problems. If you’ve got less than 25MB free, you won’t be able to install over-the-air updates to your system (including new versions of Android). Less than about 15MB, and you can’t sync emails, Facebook statuses, calendar appointments, and so on. Also, some applications can only be installed to the internal storage: Flash Player 10.1 and the AIR for Android runtime are two big examples of this, each weighing in at a hefty 10MB.

Rooting your phone allows you to move these applications — as well as various system files — to the SD card, freeing up plenty of space. In this article, we’ll look at what you can do if you don’t want to root it.